Judging jitter

Agilent Technologies has announced what it claims is industry's first high-performance serial bit error ratio tester with advanced jitter generation capabilities for jitter-tolerance testing (J-BERT) of serial gigabit devices up to 12.5 Gb/s.

The new Agilent N4903A is said to provide the only complete jitter-tolerance test solution for fast, high-quality characterisation of next-generation serial devices.

The next generation of high-speed serial bus standards with data rates of 5 Gb/s and beyond is expected by 2006. The increasing speed will cause significant signal integrity and jitter issues during the design and test of next-generation serial bus devices. In addition, new transmission techniques, such as spread spectrum clocking, make device performance characterisation more difficult and time-consuming. The Agilent N4903A provides calibrated jitter composition and automated jitter characterisation in a single box and is compliant with the latest serial bus standards.

The N4903A provides complete built-in and calibrated jitter composition for stressed eye testing of receivers. Automated and compliant jitter-tolerance testing covers all popular serial bus standards, such as PCI Express, SATA, Fibre Channel, FB-DIMM, CEI, Gigabit Ethernet and XFP.

The Agilent N4903A high-performance serial BERT includes built-in, calibrated, automated and compliant jitter-tolerance testing with sources for PJ, RJ, BUJ, ISI and sinusoidal interference. This enables fast, high-precision stressed eye testing with more than 50 percent eye closure.

The N4903A is also said to fully support complex data patterns of serial bus interfaces. Unpredictable traffic can be analysed with the bit recovery mode, enabling more realistic test scenarios. Complex training sequences can be set up with the new pattern sequencer easily, simplifying the test development process.

The Agilent N4903A high-performance serial BERT is available for order now.